Indianapolis, Indiana, April 23, 2011 – reTails, Inc., featuring 100% rescued pets, announces its 500th pet adoption since its store opening in October 2010

reTails, Inc., a local nonprofit created to bring adoptable animals and solutions for pet owners right into Indianapolis neighborhoods, announces its 500th adoption since opening its first permanent store in Washington Square Mall in October of 2010. Number 500 occurred today, Saturday April 23rd, when a Border Collie named Freckles was adopted by a local family.

“reTails is proud to have reached this milestone and especially delighted that these 500 animals, whose fate was otherwise grim, are now in loving, responsible homes. With the public’s support, we look forward to saving and finding homes for hundreds more animals this year” says reTails President, Greg Brush.

By helping pet owners solve problems that lead to the surrender of pets to local shelters, coupled with providing people a convenient way to adopt rescued cats and dogs, reTails is committed to rescuing as many animals as possible. “What’s unique about reTails is that we create opportunities for people and pets to meet when they otherwise might not have. Animal shelters are not always a top destination for pet adoption. They are sometimes too far or not convenient due to a potential adopter’s work schedule, among other reasons. reTails is helping more wonderful animals find homes because we are breaking through those barriers” states Store Manager and Marketing Coordinator, Sandy Kemp.

More than 9,000 animals were put to death in municipal Indianapolis shelters in 2010, approximately one every 57 minutes.

reTails, Inc. is an Indiana-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit. It was founded in January of 2010 by a group of animal welfare volunteers whose goal is to slow and eventually end the killing of adoptable cats and dogs by making pet adoption more convenient and by providing resources to the public to minimize the number of animals surrendered to shelters. In October of 2010, reTails opened its first permanent store in Washington Square Mall. It also holds traveling adoption events at convenient retail locations across the Indianapolis metropolitan area. Visit About reTails www.retailsindy.org for more information.

With overwhelming support by the public and the mall management, the reTails adoption center in the Washington Square Mall will be staying for 2011! We are also hopeful that we will be able to upgrade to a larger space in the mall, as our current store is now often literally packed with visitors.

The store opened October 8th and has operated Friday-Sunday every weekend, closing only for Christmas Day. Despite only being open weekends (about 20 hours each week), our store saw 222 adoptions in the 12 weeks since opening, with 31 adoptions in the 2-day Christmas weekend alone! With a larger store to provide a more comfortable environment for the animals, volunteers and shoppers, the adoptions can almost certainly be increased even beyond this!

The reTails store in the Washington Square Mall has embraced creative, common-sense approaches, and has placed many animals that are traditionally considered "unadoptable" -- geriatric dogs and cats, pets with medical conditions and quirky behaviors. Not all pets are suitable for the store environment, and we continue to do adoptions through Petfinder as well, but for the majority of pets, the store works fine!

Despite our modest success, another 10,000+ cats and dogs are expected to die in Indianapolis shelters this year. reTails has far to go before we can achieve our goal of ending the killing of the 90%+ of those animals that are healthy, or can be readily treated. We won't be content with our success until we save these animals and fulfill our mission!

But in this season of celebration, we are so thankful for the support from our amazing volunteers and donors, Tommy Holmes and all the Washington Square Mall team, and all the folks who have enriched their lives with a newly-adopted rescued pet in 2010.